Feeling anxious about learning more about the faith? Joe Heschmeyer addresses the concern of invincible ignorance and explains how to balance the desire for knowledge with the fear of judgment.
Transcript:
I’m attempting to learn more about Catholicism, and I feel like there’s almost a disincentive. This idea of invincible ignorance was thrown out there, and it’s really made me pause on learning more because if I’m not in the church that Jesus is telling me to join, then I’m standing under condemnation, and it’s putting a huge weight of anxiety on me.
So the first thing I want to say is don’t be anxious. And I know that may not be the most helpful advice you hear, but trust that God has only put these things in your life out of goodness and not to trap you, not to put you under some sort of burden of condemnation. You’re being shown more of the truth.
One of the principles in the moral life and spiritual life is that you’re judged based on what you knew or should have known. So Jesus articulates this very clearly in Luke 12:48: “Everyone to whom much is given, much will be required. Of whom they meant much, they will demand the more.”
So if you think about the talents—one guy gets five, another gets two, another gets one—and the master judges them based on whether they had five, two, or one. But we can’t respond to that by burying four of our talents and saying, “Look, I only have one talent.” That’s not invincible ignorance. That’s willful ignorance. And the Catechism is really clear—that’s worse.
Like, when—if you are—purposely, you know… I don’t know if you’ve got kids or not. I’ve got kids, and I’ve experienced sometimes they will purposely not hear what you’re trying to tell them because they don’t want to, uh, do that thing. That’s not the kind of invincible ignorance.
There are other times where they literally just—it—they were outside, and so you yelled down and said, “Hey, could you please do such and such?” And you didn’t know they were outside. They’re not on the hook for that. That’s invincible ignorance.
That’s the difference in a nutshell. There are things that we innocently don’t know, and there are things that we do know or have intentionally kept ourselves from knowing.
So you want to know the things God wants for you because they’re good things, and then you want to respond to them faithfully because that’s a good God. And that’s how we respond to a good God.
As for judging which things are ignorant and which ones aren’t—God is good. At the cross, Jesus prays, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” And those were people that I would have thought they did know. But Jesus knows their heart, and he knows whether they really got it or not.
So don’t worry that you’re going to, like, trick yourself into condemnation by learning more about the Gospel, because that’s the opposite of the liberating power of the Gospel. Like, you are learning more about God’s good plan for your life, and that gives you more to say yes to in freedom.
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